


voiceless

by thisstableground



Series: palette [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: (It's Alexander), Angst, Autistic Character, Canon Era, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Internalised ableism, M/M, Multi, Of the 'autistic in a time before they actually invented a word for it' kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 08:34:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9115174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Hamilton inhales as if to speak, but nothing comes out, and he just sighs instead. His eyes remain fixed to the wall the entire time.Lafayette frowns.“Are you alright, Alexander? It’s unlike you to be so quiet.”[Alexander can't speak, Lafayette tries to understand, Laurens is mostly just a cheeky little shit, and Mulligan is clearly the only reason the other three have survived this long.][Part of series, can be read alone.]





	

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: fuckin’ knock me dead before you take away my Alexander is autistic headcanon. Set in some unspecified time during the war where Lafayette, Laurens and Hamilton all share a tent (I do not know history. Or French, so I tried to keep it to a minimum but what's in here is all Google Translate.]

Lafayette pauses to stretch a cramp out of his writing hand and sigh, for the millionth time that day. Across Washington’s tent, John Laurens has been slowly sliding further and further towards the floor from his original spot propped up against the pallet, chin dropped to his chest as he reads the sheaf of reports resting there. It looks incredibly uncomfortable. Someone had lit the candles whilst Lafayette had been in a semi-stupor poring over his work. It’s getting late, but there are so many reports to write and papers to check before they could rest, no matter how tired they are.  
  
How tired _most_ of them are, Lafayette revises, as it comes to his attention that Alexander Hamilton is as bright and breezy as a spring morning, despite the pallor under his tan skin and the shadows imprinted under his eyes. It's quite possible that he's been spouting his usual endless monologue without stopping since Lafayette stopped paying attention an hour or so ago. Hamilton doesn’t need an audience, quite content with talking aloud to himself, one hand marking his place on the letter to which his other hand is scratching out a reply.  
  
“-if I take the first paragraph from that letter to your father, and just reword it a little it would be suited to - Laurens, are you even paying attention?” Hamilton demands.  
  
“Death is inevitable and by this point I’d welcome it,” Laurens says by way of response. “How is there still so much left to read? I never imagined revolution to be so _secretarial_.”  
  
“Revolution is _fun_ ,” says Hamilton. It’s quite possible he’s being sincere, which is frightening.  
  
Lafayette shakes his head. “I know you were working before we even woke up this morning. Has anyone ever told you that your enthusiasm is disturbing?”  
  
“Fucking right, I’m relentless,” says Hamilton, cheerfully. Laurens scowls at him: the effect is weakened by the fact that, in this position, his face is incredibly squashed.  
  
“Aaand …’Y-r…o-b-d-t servant…A dot Hamilton.’ There!”

Hamilton finishes with a smug flourish and without looking goes to grab another letter off the pile of correspondence on his left that he’s been working through since that morning. His hand hits bare wood and he stares at it for a second, before picking up random wads of paper off his desk and rifling through them with increasingly frantic movements.  
  
Laurens throws a crumple of scrap paper at him. It bounces off his head. “You alright there, Ham?”  
  
“No,” Hamilton says, horror-struck. “I’ve…finished?”  
  
“See, you say that you’ve finished, but your face right now implies that you fucked up so badly you’ll have to start over.”  
  
“But. But I can’t be finished already, I need to - Oh, here’s General Washington! Hello, sir! Do you have more correspondence for us?”  
  
He beams at the general hopefully. Washington gives Hamilton a deeply suspicious look, before turning to Lafayette and Laurens. “Has he…done something?”  
  
“Sir!”  
  
“He’s finished all his work and now he’s bored,” Laurens supplies.  
  
“A very dangerous situation,” Washington says with a smile. “Not one that I can rectify, Hamilton, I'm afraid, everything else is being taken care of already. You’ve been non-stop for the past four days. I suggest you enjoy the break.”  
  
“I can help Lafayette or Laurens with their tasks, sir. It’ll be much faster with two of us.”  
  
Laurens huffs. “We can manage fine, Alex. You look like you died about three days ago and someone forgot to tell you. Have you slept?”  
  
“At some point in my life, yes,” Hamilton replies. “Sir, I don’t need a break, I need -“  
  
“You need to rest, Hamilton,” Washington tells him gently. “The revolution will have to struggle through the night without you. No, Alexander, that’s an _order._ ”  
  
Hamilton, mouth opened ready to argue further, snaps it shut without saying anything. As if the movement signals a surrender to the rest of his body, all the manic energy of moments before visibly drains out of him. He nods to the occupants of the tent, and his gait is slightly unsteady as he leaves.  
  
“That was a barely even a disagreement, he really must be exhausted,” says Laurens. “Meanwhile, the rest of us must soldier on at our snail’s pace. Ugh. Perhaps we should’ve made him stay after all.”  
  
“Well, maybe he’ll finally get some proper rest, if you two are trapped here instead of out there, leading him astray.”  
  
“Sir!” says Laurens, shocked. Lafayette snorts.  
  
“Sir, you know that Alexander could find trouble locked in an empty room without needing us involved,” he says. “I do hope he gets some sleep, though.”  
  
***  
  
It’s absolutely no surprise to find, an hour later when Lafayette finally returns to his own tent (Laurens, still deeply ensconced in his work, had groaned like a dying man and flipped two middle fingers up at him as he left), that Hamilton is awake. He’s sat on his pallet with his legs drawn up and elbows resting on his knees. His hair is loose and wild, and he’s twisting and untwisting a lock of it between his fingers vacantly.  
  
The movement is a strange reminder of something almost blurred beyond comprehension: Lafayette and his mother, her slim fingers winding string around his small chubby hands in complex patterns and then neatly plucking it out, some kind of half-forgotten childhood game while her voice sings faintly above him. He stores the memory away like a precious document: he likes to remember, but never to dwell.  
  
“That can’t be more worthy of your time than a night of rest,” Lafayette teases. Hamilton inhales as if to speak, but nothing comes out, and so he just sighs instead. His eyes remain fixed to the wall the entire time.

Lafayette frowns. “Are you alright, Hamilton? It’s unlike you to be so quiet.”

 

(Once, he’d seen Hamilton sit bolt upright from a catnap after two full days of no sleep just to harangue Burr, precise and devastating as always.  
  
“I’d hoped that catching you in repose would’ve given me a moment's peace to talk with Lafayette,” Burr had said irritably.  
  
Hamilton had grinned that way he reserved only for Burr, because he liked the way it made the other man’s jaw clench in frustration. “You really should know me better by now, _sir_.”  
  
The second Burr had left, Hamilton had immediately fallen back to sleep. It was impressive.)

 

Once again, Alexander looks poised to reply, but nothing comes out, so he instead makes a complicated gesture that Lafayette suspects would be as eloquent and descriptive as his usual spoken word, but for the fact that it’s completely incomprehensible to him. Alexander screws up his face in annoyance, hands returning to his hair and giving such a sharp tug that his whole body wrenches.  
  
“Hamilton? Alexander? You are beginning to scare me.”

Alexander does not acknowledge him, which only worries him more. Lafayette has never seen him like this, but there’s something familiar about his distant eyes, his jerky movements. 

Lafayette has spent time enough in battle to know its effects on soldiers. Men lose the power of speech, imprisoned inside their minds by the horrors they have seen and inflicted, each of them a taut wire that might snap towards tears or violence or the wheezing breathlessness of panic. A medic, he thinks, would be equipped to deal with such a problem. On the other hand, too many are insensitive to the ghosts of trauma, believing it to it indicate a weak mind, and the usual whispers would be all the harsher since Alexander's position means he has seen less true battle than some . Not that this means very much at all: Lafayette is a more keen observer than most would give him credit for, he has seen the steel in his friend’s wiry frame and rigid posture, and it's clear as day that Alexander’s war started long before any of them met him.

The decision is made for him when he tentatively suggests calling a medic: Alexander shakes his head wildly before returning to his distant staring, this time biting at his lips. So it would seem at least that Alexander is not trapped within a memory, and Lafayette concedes that he seems more lost and frustrated than haunted anyway. It's a similar expression to the one Laurens, notoriously careless with his belongings, gets when trying to find a lost document or missing clothing moments before a meeting with the general: preoccupied, searching, increasingly frantic.  
  
Ah, and perhaps this is what has happened: something is lost. Is it possible for a man - a man like Alexander Hamilton, no less - to misplace his words so completely? And how would one help him find them again? Lafayette taps his fingers against his lips, thinking. He doesn't like to give up, but he is more sensible than either of the fools he rooms with, won’t throw himself recklessly into something this important.

There's only one option that might work, though it means leaving Alexander alone for now. Lafayette will have to be quick.  
  
  
***  
  
Hercules Mulligan is not that much older than any of them and by no means paternal in the calm, quiet sense that Washington is - perhaps closer to an older brother. Either way, with two feral urchins like Hamilton and Laurens around, Mulligan is a wise and steady presence in comparison, and Lafayette feels better immediately upon finding him in his own tent, patching a jacket.  
  
(Lafayette had said this to his three companions once, as they sat around the fire at night.  
  
“ _Excuse_ you? Ham and I don’t have to sit here and listen to this kind of slander,” Laurens had complained.  
  
“Actually, it seems broadly accurate,” Hamilton had said. “I mean, I fulfil basically any criteria for your typical urchin, and one need only _glance_ at Laurens to know he’s fera-aaagh!” He was cut off by Laurens flinging himself sideways and toppling them both over in a sitting-down approximation of a tackle. “You're not proving me wrong, you dick!”  
  
Mulligan looked over to Lafayette with raised eyebrows, doing a decent job of ignoring the two supposedly-grown men batting at each other like agitated kittens right under his feet. “You say that like it’s not all three of you I always have to pull out of trouble, Laf.”  
  
“ _Ow,_ Hamilton, did you just _bite me,_ you-“  
  
“I don’t get into trouble,” Lafayette protested. “I simply - um, what’s the - ah, I provide a much-needed lightheartedness. In a dignified and mature way, _bien sûr_.”  
  
Mulligan snorted. “Oh, mature like that time Laurens said that dude at the bar had a stupid hairstyle and you went up behind the guy all silent-like and cut off his ponytail, and then I had to stop him beating the shit out of you? Yeah, I bet that one would've really killed at the royal court.”  
  
“Or like how you spent all last week creeping into Burr’s tent while he slept to steal one of his boots and then sneaking in to put it back whenever he came to our tent to accuse me,” Hamilton piped up from the ground, breathlessly trying to shove Laurens off his legs. “Did I tell you that I suggested he was probably just losing his mind and he got all huffy, but then Laurens was working in Washington’s tent with him later and said that he kept peering under the desk with this worried look every two minutes then nodding to himself, like he had to confirm he was still wearing both boots.”  
  
“Ha, that was great,” said Laurens, tugging sharply on Hamilton’s ponytail. “He was being so weird that Washington asked in this really gentle voice if he was feeling quite well or if perhaps he should take a rest, and he’s _never_ that nice to Burr, and Burr made this noise that sounded like if someone stepped on a frog then just looked at the sky like he was praying for death for a solid five minutes. Mature, no, not even a little, but so beautiful.”  
  
Lafayette cackled. “Yes, yes, or-“  
  
“So remind me again how you’re any different to these idiots?” Mulligan interrupted, attempting to look long-suffering but ruining it by smiling.  
  
“I’m too tall to be an urchin.”  
  
Hamilton made an affronted noise. Laurens mimicked it. Hamilton elbowed Laurens viciously in the side. Mulligan pulled them up and apart by their collars before they fell back to scuffling.  
  
“No you don’t, children, I’m not gonna explain it to Washington when when of you overdoes it and ends up falling in the fire,” he reprimanded.  
  
“When did you get so old and wise, Herc? The Mulligan I knew back in the day would've set himself on fire four times already, just for the story.”  
  
“Shut the fuck up, Alex.”)

 

“Laf! What’s up?” Mulligan glances at him, and seems to catch onto his mood pretty fast. “Oh, wow,better make that a less rhetorical what’s up?”  
  
“It’s Alexander,” he says, then fidgets with his sleeve while he wonders how best to explain the situation.  
  
“Isn’t it always,” Mulligan replies mildly, but he turns his full attention to Lafayette, who finds himself speaking rapidly without even meaning to, his English all over the place like it hasn’t been for a long time. The four of them really are as bad as each other at getting into trouble, but it’s always Mulligan who knows how to fix things.  
  
“He is, well, you know how hard he has been working. He finished before me today and then when I came back to the tent he was behaving so strangely. He should sleep but he won't _et je ne sais pas ce qui ne va pas avec lui,_  and he was hurting himself so I thought- I thought I should get a medic but he didn't want me to and you used to live with him so -“

“Slow down, Laf. And maybe try to stick to one language, we can’t all be polyglots,” Mulligan says, standing and pressing his hands into Lafayette’s shoulders to ground him. His voice is calm as ever but his grip, slightly too hard, betrays him. “You said he was hurting himself?”  
  
“Not in any serious way, or I wouldn’t have left him,” Lafayette hastens to assure him. “It looked more like… _merde_ , _je ne sais pas_ , like he was trying to get the words out by force. He cannot seem to find his voice, you see, and I do not know how to help. Can you help him?” 

At that, Mulligan relaxes, but barely. “Shit, yeah, I’ve seen this happen a few times,” he says without elaborating, as he drags Lafayette out of the tent at speed.

Mulligan’s hand pulling him along is a spark that flames into another memory: a formless mass of people towering above him, the beginnings of childish panic until a familiar hand catches his small wrist, his father’s reassuring voice chiding him to stay close lest he lose him in the crowd. His parents left his life so early that he has few conscious memories of them. It’s odd, but since meeting his three friends, since Washington, he finds these hidden fragments of family rising unbidden from his past so much more frequently. He treasures each one.  


They approach Lafayette’s tent panting a little, and watch Alexander from the entrance for a moment as they catch their breath. He hasn’t changed his position but his restless hands have found a pattern that repeats over and over: he twists a thick lock of hair around his palm up to the roots, pulls hard and violent, then releases and combs through it with a tender touch as of a parent to a child. It doesn’t seem like he’s noticed them.  
  
Mulligan takes a step closer, approaching slowly. “Kid, you’re too vain about that hair of yours to treat it that way,” he chides.  
  
Alexander doesn’t stop, or even look up, but something in his face softens just a little.  
  
“You wanna tell me what’s up?” Mulligan asks. Despite how often they turn to him as a safe and solid figure, it still surprises Lafayette sometimes, how gentle he can be. Alexander taps his fingers twice against his lips and makes a helpless motion that Lafayette has no trouble deciphering: even if Alexander wanted to talk, he couldn’t.  
  
“Alright, that’s fine, that’s what I thought. No problem. You feel up to writing it down?”  
  
A shake of the head, than Alexander looks quickly at Lafayette, dropping his gaze almost immediately. He waves his hand first towards Lafayette and then towards the door in a movement somehow both elegant and stilted at once.  
  
“Laf was just worried,” Mulligan soothes, clearly more practised in interpreting Alexander’s gestures. “This is why I thought it might be better to tell him and Laurens before it happened - I know, it’s difficult,” he hastily adds, as Alexander shifts into a familiar _now look here_ posture. “I do know that, kid. I get why you wouldn’t. But you trust us all, right? So trust _me_ when I say Laf was just worried, that’s why he left, he came right back with me, he doesn’t think badly of you, we - Oh, Alex, please don’t-“  
  
Alexander is tugging at his own hair again, so hard that several strands get ripped out. Mulligan gives Lafayette a look that’s half-desperate, half-threatening. He decides to go on instinct.  
  
“ _Petit lion_ , if you wish this much to look like Burr, there are less painful ways to achieve baldness.” It works as intended, stilling Alexander’s hands, though the sound he makes is only the barest imitation of his usual wild giggle. “Would you like me to braid it for you, while you still have some of it left?”  
  
Aleander wavers, looking at Mulligan, who rolls his eyes. “There’s not a wrong answer, kid, do whatever you want.”  
  
At Alexander’s tiny nod, Lafayette settles onto the pallets they charitably refer to as beds, while Alexander shifts to lay on his stomach and bury his face against Lafayette’s thigh. He winces a bit when Lafayette runs featherlight fingers through his hair, and Lafayette thinks of the rough pull of Alexander’s own hands and adapts to a firmer pressure, though not enough to hurt.  
  
Mulligan perches next to them and Alexander reaches out blindly to grab his sleeve, rubbing a thumb rhythmically across the coarse material. Something in the combination of movements works: he is still silent, but at least the tension ekes out of him slowly. As he reaches the end of the braid, Lafayette unravels it and begins over, keeps doing so until Alexander finally goes limp in sleep.  
  
“If only it were so easy to get you to rest every day,” Lafayette murmurs, equal parts sad and affectionate. He keeps his voice pitched low as he looks to Mulligan. “You say you have seen this before, then? You know what troubles our little lion?”  
  
“No. I mean, I know it’s just a thing that happens, how to help a bit, but he’s never explained actually what _it_ is. Pretty much all I ever do is give him a bit of company til everything comes back.” Mulligan hesitates, a rare thing to see. “After the first few times, once he realised I wasn’t going to…I don’t actually know what he thought I might do, but I feel like probably people haven’t always been too kind about the whole thing, before? I wasn’t sure at first if he wanted me around, and he’s never said outright, you know what Alex is like, but he’ll always come and find me, just to sit. I think he likes knowing that he’s not scared me off, that I'll still treat him normal. Poor kid.”  
  
People think of them as two pairs, Hamilton-and-Laurens, Lafayette-and-Mulligan. A vast oversimplification when beneath the surface of the four of them lies a bright tapestry. They all have their own threads that interlink them, different combinations, different connections. Mulligan’s the only person in the world who could get away with calling Alexander ‘kid’.  
  
“I wouldn’t ever pity him,” Lafayette says. It seems important that someone knows this. “I could sometimes weep for how cruel life has been to him, but I wouldn’t _dare_ pity him.”  
  
“I’m glad you know now, Laf. You did good today.”  
  
“I don’t feel like I did very much at all,” Lafayette admits, sighing. “He thought I was going to just leave him here alone, didn't he?”  
  
“You came back,” Mulligan reassures him softly. “I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing he’s ever wanted.”  
  
_Oh_ , Lafayette does love his friends so, whatever the mess they all are. The enormity of it flares up without warning so fiercely that he closes his eyes to shield against the brightness. He is tired, all of a sudden. Mulligan squeezes his shoulder and the bed shifts as he stands. Lafayette is already so close to sleep that he barely whispers a goodbye, drifting off with his hands still resting lightly in Alexander’s dark hair.  
  
***  
  
He wakes up in the morning with an aching neck and Alexander still fast asleep pressed to his side. John Laurens, returned to the tent at some point in the night and just now, rising from his own pallet, gives him an amused look. It’s hardly the first time any of them have shared a bed, and Lafayette is pondering whether it would be best to make a joke of it when Alexander raises his ruffled head, face disgruntled, eyes barely open.  
  
“Have you returned to us today, little one?” Lafayette asks. Alexander considers the question, and makes a rocking _eh_ sort of motion with his hand. Lafayette’s heart sinks, whilst Laurens’ face grows concerned.  
  
“Did- is everything okay, Alex?” John asks. Alex stops squinting to look at him properly for a long, silent moment. John falters slightly. “Laf, did something happen?”  
  
Lafayette doesn’t know what to say, or if its his place to tell anyone, even Laurens, about last night. Alexander had chosen not to tell either of them.Aaron Burr pokes his head into the tent, disrupting the tension in the air, albeit only to replace it with a new, slightly worse tension.  
  
“Laurens, the General requests your presence.”

Nobody acknowledges him. Burr sighs. “Preferably _today_ , Laurens.”  
  
“Christ, fine, I’m coming, okay.” Burr withdraws from the tent, and Laurens goes to follow him. As he passes, Alexander reaches out and grabs at his arm.  
  
“John,” is all he says, too loud, voice rasping like it’s been full weeks since it was used instead of only a night. John pauses to gaze back at him, the only person Alexander needs nothing more than a look to communicate with, and nods.  
  
“Later, then. I’ll be back as soon as I can. See you, Laf.”  
  
John whacks Alexander gently around the back of the head as he leaves. The tent flap rustles closed, and Lafayette pulls his legs to sit cross-legged opposite Alexander, who has taken up the same elbows-on-knees position as yesterday. “It is good to hear you again, _petit lion_. Mulligan says that you have not told him what this…uh, situation is all about? I do not mean to pry, of course, but you should know by now you will not scare us away so easily.”  
  
It takes a long minute before a response comes.  
  
“I haven’t told him because I don’t know how to explain it.” It's such a relief to hear his voice properly, even though the sound comes out achingly slow and weak. “But I think, maybe, if anyone would understand…”  
  
Alexander presses his fingers to his mouth in thought. They sit quietly for a time, their breathing the only sound disturbing the morning. “You know the feeling when you are grasping to describe something and can’t get it out right?”  
  
There are many phrases, so delicate and precise in French, which become clumsy and wrong in English, many that have no real translation at all. “ _Oui, cela semble familier._ "

“ _Oui, mon ami,_ I thought so,” Alexander smiles at him, and his voice is grows stronger as he continues. “It’s always been a…problem, for me. Much worse when I was a child - I learned to speak much later than my older brother, so late that my parents thought I might be mute. If you can believe that."

Alexander has talked a little of his family, but Lafayette did not know that he had an older brother. It’s probably best not to ask for details, he thinks. Not to mention he’d vaguely assumed that Alexander was born with his current personality fully-formed, and that he probably came out lecturing the midwife on proper birthing technique. He keeps his surprise to himself.

“Even when I could talk, I had these episodes. People didn't like it much, they'd always- My mother would never say, but I always suspected it’s why my father- no, no, none of this is important. I learnt to read before I could speak, it came so much easier, it helped. To, to have someone else’s writing fill my head with the words I used to struggle to find. To be able to write when I couldn’t talk. It really helped, and after my mother was gone it was all I had. If you’re studious enough, nobody will question your silence. If you can prove your intelligence, nobody can tell you that you’re a -“ Alexander cuts himself off again, a bitter expression twisting his face.  
  
Lafayette thinks of the patronising smiles every time he had to punctuate a sentence with “how do you say”, of people talking to him in slow, loud voices even though he understands English far better than he can speak it. Of how people have hesitated to give him complex tasks which he has proven himself perfectly capable of, thinking his muddled speech must mean a muddled mind. It isn’t really the same, not even close, but perhaps the closest Alexander has found for a long time.  
  
“You do not need to prove anything to us, _ami,_ ” he says softly. “Is this why you work yourself to such extents? You must know we would not think less of you.”  
  
“ _You_ might not, Laf, or Herc or John, but be realistic. I’m a bastard immigrant that came from poverty already. That’s more than enough for some people to think me completely incapable on principle. I needn’t add any of my other…quirks to their arsenal against me.” A pause. “And…and, if I work hard, this _thing_ doesn’t happen. It’s when I stop that it all crashes down, when there’s nothing to focus on but how tired I am it’s like coming back into my own body, and things don’t work, there’s too much and - I just know that as long I don’t stop, I can keep pretending I’m just normal.”  
  
It probably happens _because_ you work so very hard, Lafayette wants to say. But…well, he is not entirely ignorant to the difference in the way people treat the members of their little band of friends. It’s _true_ that Alexander has to work harder for the world to recognise his exceptional worth, however unfair it may be. It is this shared connection that made brothers of Alexander and Mulligan, though one of them thrives on attention and the other prefers to work in the shadows anyway.  
  
Lafayette hates to know that he could so easily have been one of those people who walk with their noses in the air past the immigrant and the tailor’s apprentice without a word of acknowledgement, only to speak as though close companions to a marquis or the son of a rich senator. He knows his own reasons for breaking away from high society, but he does wonder sometimes what brought Laurens here, why he fits so perfectly among their little crowd of outcasts. 

This is what rankles him about Burr, too. The resentment in Burr’s eyes when Alexander succeeds above him, as though Alexander hadn’t worked himself to the bone to get there whilst Burr just waited as though his success should be inevitable. Alexander doesn't seem to notice it, but Lafayette has always been sharp-eyed about the emotions of others. He doesn’t dislike Burr, even considers him a friendly acquaintance and an intelligent ally, but that doesn’t mean he won’t deal out minor justice by stealing the man’s boots every once in a while.  
  
“You could never be normal, Alexander, but that is no bad thing,” he says, instead of all this. “And I don’t believe you would ever want to be something that…unexciting. So what is it that you really mean?”

Alexander picks at fibres on the blanket they’re both still half-tangled in.  


“…I dont understand it,” he admits, in the quietest voice. The idea that there might be things in the world he doesn’t understand seems to disgust him. “I dont know why it happens, I probably never will know, and it scares the hell out me because, because, the words have always come back before but what if one day they don’t? What’s wrong with me, that this happens in the first place? Sometimes I can’t talk, sometimes I can’t even think clear enough to _write_. All I am is the words I can use and yet there are days when my head is nothing but noise and colour, Laf, and I don’t _know why_!”

He gets louder and louder as the sentence progresses, breathing hard, but when his voice cracks towards the end he tips his head forwards til his whole face is hidden. This doesn’t stop Lafayette from seeing the droplets that spatter onto Alexander’s clenched hands, and he finds himself blinking hard against his own suddenly stinging eyes. He's a sympathetic crier at the best of times, and he has never seen Alexander weep before. It feels like a strange, heavy responsibility.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Alexander is whispering, a wet and raw-sounding mantra. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  
  
“Alexander. Oh, our Alex,” he says, reaching out to tap two fingers gently under Alexander’s chin, just once. He doesn’t want to force Alexander to look up if he would prefer to stay hidden; only to show that whenever he chooses to, Lafayette will be there.  
  
“I fear that I too lack the right words for this,” Lafayette says quietly. “But I will do my best. Alexander, do not apologise to me for this - _non, ne pas interrompre_ , I can see that you are ready to argue with me as always. You’ve done so much with your words already that I honestly believe you could take a vow of silence and never pick up a quill again for the whole rest of your life, and you’ll still have said more of worth than any other man I know.”  
  
Alex’s shoulders hitch slightly. Lafayette feels a gentle spill of tears on his own cheeks too. It feels earned, feels like relief. He wants so badly to do this right.  
  
“And I think also, _mon ami_ , that language is as much in the, uh, I don’t know how to- the look of it? Some things I find to be untranslatable from the French not because they lose meaning, but because they lose the beauty of the flow of letters on the page, or the joy of how they feel upon the tongue.”

“The aesthetic quality. Or the essence, perhaps, would be more fitting,” Alex mumbles, almost reflexively. Lafayette nods.  
  
“ _Oui_. The part of it which is the thing itself. You can call a colour blue, and that is slightly different to  _bleu_ _,_ but neither arethe same as looking at the sky, _non_? And so perhaps when this happens next time, we should instead see the beauty of these noises and colours only for what they are, and not for how well you can translate them.”  
  
Alexander breathes out a quiet, damp laugh, and finally raises his head. ”You're smarter than you look, Laf.”  
  
“Shut up,” Lafayette says, smiling. On impulse, he curls a hand around the back of Alexander’s neck and pulls him in so their foreheads rest together. Their eyes meet only briefly before Alexander closes his, but he doesn’t pull away. Lafayette doesn’t mind, just looks at his dark eyelashes instead. “Alexander, you are so much more than just your words. If not to the world, then at least to us. Nothing will change that.”  
  
It’s at this point where two things happen: Alexander starts loudly sobbing, and Laurens returns to the tent, Mulligan at his back.  
  
“Alex!” John shouts as soon as he's confronted by his friend's tear-wrecked face and shuddering breath. He's by his side in half a second, stroking his hair and clinging to him. “Alex, Alex, don’t cry, what happened, it’s okay, what happened, _Laf why are you crying too?”_  
  
It would probably be more comforting if John weren’t still yelling. Alexander starts laughing properly through his tears. “I'm fine, Laurens. We were just talking and it got a bit much."  
  
“A bit much what?” John pushes, then makes a face at himself. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me. I just want to be sure you’re alright.”  
  
Lafayette takes the opportunity to finally get up, pressing a gentle kiss to Alexander’s forehead and patting John reassuringly on the shoulder before he does so. “I think it would be best if we leave you to brief our dear Laurens on the situation.”  
  
“After all that, I still don’t really know how to say it,” Alexander admits, sounding more like himself than he has all morning.  
  
“I have no doubt that you’ll manage one way or another,” Lafayette tells him fondly. Mulligan’s arm is around his shoulders steering him outside into the sun, Alexander and John’s voices fading into quiet murmurs as the tent flap drops closed behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: I felt at least a single emotion while writing this, which was exhausting and I hope to never do it again. Also how does everything I write keep ending up in this weirdly unclear state of gay
> 
> A Friendly Tip: these four are the most touchy-feeliest revolutionaries ever so they all cool with it but if you have an Alexander in your life make sure that they’re fine with any sort of forehead-resting or whatever before you jump in right in there, especially if they are having a rough day. Actually, that doesn't just apply to autistic people, don't go round putting your face on any old whoever's without permission, it's not an okay thing to do.
> 
> on tumblr at thisstableground if you wanna hang.]


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